Encryption: Not Just For Home Computers

How often have you used a keyfob to unlock your car door remotely? Have you ever wondered if a thief could somehow find out the master code that would allow them to unlock any car? Fortunately, automobile engineers and computer scientists have already anticipated this problem and implement a few important security features.
Most keyless entry systems broadcast on a frequency between 300 and 400 mhz. However, if the key fob used the same frequency every time, it would be relatively easy to produce the proper frequency to unlock any car. This is where computer chips rise to the challenge. Whenever the unlock button is pushed on the keyfob and the car is within range to receive the signal, the frequency used by the keyfob changes. A computer inside the vehicle will then only respond to that exact frequency. The code is stored inside the car, so in order to hack it the thief would have to break into the car by some other means, defeating the purpose of gaining entry remotely. Which frequency occurs next is random, reducing the probability that a thief would be able to predict the frequency the vehicle will accept next. However, true random numbers cannot actually be produced by a computer. A random number within a computer satisifies mathematical properties ensuring that each number is equally as likely as the next, but a seed must be given indicating where to start within a table of random numbers. If the computer starts at the same seed everytime, the same sequence of random numbers will be produced. For this reason, the codes indicating the next number in the sequence are encrypted as well. In general, encryption means that the data is scrambled and unreadable, unless the key or mathematical function that transforms it into readable data is known. All of this essentially means that unlocking a vehicle remotely can be done with confidence.

PC Security 101

After a long day at work, you come home and fire up your trusty home computer, hoping to check your email and browse the web. After what seems like ages, it finally boots up, only to immediately turn off. Frustrated, you try again; but to your dismay nothing seems to be able to resurrect it. Does this sound familiar?
Unfortunately, this is an all too common scenario. What has most likely happened is the computer has been infected with any number of viruses, trojans and spyware which hinder the performance of the computer. Some of these are able to heal themselves by connecting to the internet, while others store multiple copies on your hard disk drive in case one becomes damaged. Unfortunately, I have learned from personal experience that the fastest and only guaranteed way to restore your computer to a usable stage would be to completely reformat your hard drive and re-install the operating system, wiping all of your data. But what could be done to prevent this from happening in the first place?
For any computer that is connected to the internet, an antivirus program is an absolute must. Unfortunately, there are so many of them out there that choosing the right one becomes a daunting task. According to independent tests, a free program called Avira Antivirus detected the most viruses, malware, worms, trojans and other malware with a detection rate of 99.2% out of a set of 1,096,202 malicious programs. In terms of antiviruses, that's quite impressive.
At one time, an antivirus program was able to fully protect your personal computer. Unfortunately, spyware has been increasing in recent years, so a good antispyware program is essential. Spybot Search & Destroy searches for more than 24,000 different possible infections and is available for free here. These programs still won't keep you safe from hackers, so a firewall is essential. Although Windows XP and Vista have built in firewalls, a good firewall will improve the security of your computer. According to a consumer research company, the best free firewall is Comodo Antivirus, which is available here. All of the programs I have mentioned are free, so improving the security of your computer does not have to correlate with the draining of your wallet.

$1 Trillion Dollar Data Loss: Just What Hackers Ordered

It seems that 2008 was a grim year, but not just in terms of the economy. McAfee, the maker of a well-known antivirus, has estimated that the total economic loss due to data theft in 2008 was $1 trillion dollars. To put that in perspective, it is approximately 1/10 of the current federal deficit. Imagine what could be done with $1 trillion dollars.
So why was the number so high? Well, according to McAfee malware increased by 400% in 2008 and over 80% of businesses surveyed found some sort of malware on their computers capable of stealing valuable financial information. Ironically, not even companies that make security software are safe. Kaspersky, which has produced an antivirus that in many independent tests detects a higher percentage of viruses, worms, trojans and rootkits than either McAfee or the well known Norton Antivirus, while producing very few false positives, had its website hacked over the weekend with a simple SQL injection. Apparently no one is safe, but what can be done to reduce the probability of an attack like this affecting your own personal finances? Tune in next time to find out.

Encryption: The Backbone of Security

In order to protect sensitive data being sent across the internet, a process called encryption is used. Encryption uses some sort of mathematical function that transforms the data, making it unreadable by everyone except the person who possesses the key, which is used to transform the data back into its original state. When the data is transformed, the process is called encrypting. When the data is received and converted back into its original form, the process is called decrypting.
How well an encryption technique works depends upon several factors. First, the larger the key is the safer the data will be. What is more important is what technique is used. The transformation must create a set of data that does not seem to fit any kind of patterns, otherwise it would be simple for a computer program to simulate data and find the function that was used.
One of the problems encountered when data is encrypted is that somehow the encryption key has to be known by both parties. This creates a problem because the encryption key has to be sent unencrypted, or encrypted by some other encryption technique. However, this means that if the other encryption technique has already been cracked then the new key will be immediately know. Public key cryptography, also known as asymmetric cryptography overcomes this problem. This algorithm is employed by SSL encryption, which is used for many banking sites and to verify passwords for emails. This algorithm uses two keys; one is used to encrypt the message and the other is used to decrypt it. Therefore only one key needs to be made public, and the other can be kept private. The public key can be used by anyone to encrypt a message, but it can only be decrypted by the private key. This increases the overall security of the encryption algorithm.

Removing the Nav Bar

How many of you have been annoyed by the navigation bar at the top of your blog? In my opinion, it just takes away from our blogs. Being a computer science guy, I knew that there had to be a simple solution to removing it. After a bit of research I found out that a simple CSS definition would work quite nicely in this situation.
For those of you who don't know what CSS is, it is simply an extension to HTML or any kind of XML document that allows for changes to the way a web page is laid out. In this case we will use it to remove the annoying navigation bar. Now that we know what CSS is, how do we implement it?
Obviously, you must first log in to your blogger accout. Under the section titled Manage Blogs click on layout. Near the top you will find four options: Page elements, Fonts and Colors, Edit HTML, and Pick New Template. What we are interested in is editing HTML, so click on that link and it will take you to the html layout of your blog. If you have never seen HTML before, what is laid out on the page before you may seem like gibberish, but have no worries for what you are going to do is simply paste a bit of code just above the Variable definitions. Search for /* Variable definitions and post this code above it:

#navbar-iframe {
display: none !important;
}

Click on preview to make sure it works and then save template. That's it, you're done!

Windows 7: The answers to the problems of Vista?

Let's face it, Windows Vista is not what it was hyped to be. Perhaps it may not be as bad as Windows ME (it only lasted for a year and was quickly replaced by Windows XP), but it definitely does not deliver in terms of speed and performance when used with the exact same hardware. Actually, Windows 98 performed better than Vista-so what gives? (actual benchmark tests available here.)
What many people don't realize is that sometimes speed isn't everything. Windows Vista is much more secure than XP, due to the implementation of Windows defender to prevent spyware and other threats. The internal workings of Vista was changed to prevent the ongoing problems Windows XP had with buffer overflows, which presents a significant security risk. So it seems like Windows Vista is the clear choice? Well, not exactly. Due to the high system requirements, some people found that updating to Vista was impossible without upgrading or replacing their entire system. Others who upgraded with the minimum specifications found that Vista was much slower than XP. Windows 7 promises to be more efficient and easier to use.
Nowadays, most computers are dual-core or even quad-core. Engineers were no longer able to make a computer chip any smaller or faster due to heat concerns, so they integrated two or more chips into one, so essentially data is processed by two chips at once. While this offers a significant increase in speed, neither Windows Vista nor XP are designed to efficiently take advantage of these multi-core machines. Windows 7 will have some minor tweaks that add some flexibility to the scheduling of processes thus allowing it to more efficiently use these multi cores. Combine that with an improved user interface and perhaps Windows 7 will finally be able to replace Vista so downgrading to XP will no longer be necessary. Until then, my computer with XP and some independent security software suits me just fine.